Thor: Ragnarok is the Marvel movie I’ve
been waiting for my entire life. While I
am no doubt sure that, one day, someone very talented will take the legends of
a space Viking and his lightning hammer, or the antics of a man with a
shrinking suit, or the big green one, and create a very searing, dramatic, artistic
examination of the human psyche, let’s not pretend that was ever what Marvel characters
were meant to be. And such serious angles
have never been what make the Marvel movies fun to experience. The more tongue-in-cheek the MCU is, the more
colorful it is, the more focused on just how damn charming its cast is, the
better it is, and with Thor: Ragnarok,
this extended Disney branding exercise reaches a particular height it’s otherwise
only achieved in the first Avengers
movie and both Guardians of the Galaxy
features.

I
don’t need Oscar-worthy acting. I don’t
need a script filled with gravitas. I
don’t want the brown pallet of most modern action movies. Give me a handful of lead characters dripping
with charisma and chemistry, with a campy-as-all-hell villain strutting up and
down every piece of scenery handed to her.
Give me a vibrant color pallet presented via gorgeous cinematography and
production design. Give me a head-pounding
score, with a few choice rock classics thrown in for good measure. And give me the laughs and the
one-liners. Oh, give me all the
one-liners.

I
may be one of the few people left on Earth who actually thought The Dark World was not only better than the
first Thor movie, but was (at the
time) one of the best Marvel movies to date.
At the very least, it started to move sharply away from the more
serious, tedious world-building of previous MCU films and started to embrace
much more of the camp that makes all these various genre films feel a part of
the same universe. Ragnarok takes that shift and pumps its veins full of acid,
spinning away from the past Thor
movies so hard and so fast that it very nearly threatens to fall out of the MCU
entirely and into a parallel dimension where Jeff Goldblum succeeded in
becoming the Greek God he was clearly meant to be.

More
than anything else, this film’s pacing sets it up right from the start for
success- we are briskly reminded that Thanos is out there, there are infinity
stones that need finding, and we get a short (but excellent) cameo from
Benedict Cumberbatch’s Doctor Strange, but what little we need to know is explained
quickly and let be so that we can get right to the fun times. Pretty much every previous character from the
franchise is summarily dropped- Natalie Portman and her coterie have been
excised, and aside from Idris Elba (who remains one of the most underappreciated
side actors in the entire MCU), the few Asgardians we knew from the past are
killed when Thor’s long-banished sister, Hela (Cate Blanchett as Reverse
Galadriel), returns to lay claim to the throne and launch war upon the
universe.

Thor
and Loki’s initial encounter with her goes disastrously- Thor loses his hammer
and both find themselves cast into a parallel world ruled over by an absolutely
delicious Jeff Goldblum, who’s so good he only fails to be the best new villain
in the Marvel MCU by virtue of the fact that Cate Blanchett is also in this
movie. They soon find new allies- Tessa
Thompson as a long-lost Asgardian warrior and Bruce Banner (who’s been stuck in
Hulk form since Age of Ultron)- and
have to fight their way out of enslavement and back to Asgard in order to
prevent Ragnarok, the end of the world.

This
movie is one of the best examples this year of the principle that the journey
is always better than the destination, and that sticking to a time-honored,
predictable formula is no problem as long as you do it right. There are no big twists or attempts to make
the film be more than what it is. It
just is. Chris Hemsworth is as impossibly
handsome and rogueish as ever, Tom Hiddleston is still having way too much fun
with his life, and their chemistry with each other is so perfectly fine-tuned
by now, I wouldn’t complain if they canceled the rest of the MCU (except Black Panther, obviously) and just let
them both star in buddy comedies till they die, or bodily ascend to
Valhalla.

They
are balanced out by Mark Ruffalo giving two remarkable performances as both the
aggressive Hulk and the mild-mannered Banner, as well as Thompson’s wounded and
surly ex-Valkyrie, who better damn well get something to do in the next Avengers movie. Even Karl Urban is finally back in a big picture
as Skurge, a skeevy, opportunistic Asgardian who decides (slightly reluctantly)
to hitch his wagon to the Hela Train as a means to wealth and power.

It’s
amazing just how much detail is packed into every shot of the film. Yes, the CGI use is extremely heavily
utilized, but it’s gorgeous, detail-packed CGI, with a bounty of great
character designs and a breezy, drive-by quality in how it takes us past one
fascinating visual or new idea after another, but never bogging itself down
trying to have it all make sense. The
new bits of the world we need to know about are explained, and those we don’t
need to know about aren’t, which, in the best tradition of hint-don’t-tell,
allows this film to be a fun, riveting, tightly-packed adventure that still
feels like only a part of a larger universe, one that we may get to revisit in
the future if we are so lucky.

The
Gladiator-style planet Thor and Loki initially fall into is a perfect example
of this; pretty much every other character, be it a named one or some extra in
the corner of the shot, has a completely different costume design and look,
with a thousand different styles and color schemes all intermingling on the
screen. And with each shot of a crowd or
a street, I couldn’t help but remind myself that, whether what we’re seeing it
CGI or not, someone still had to sit down and come up with each of the bonkers
designs we see. It’s the sort of
obsessive effort that also made the luscious visuals of Valerian something to behold, but without the unequal acting that
dragged that otherwise fascinating work down from the heights it sought to
reach.

There
will be many people wringing their hands over the lack of any real depth or
variation to the story, or the fact that once again we’re given a villain below
Iago-levels of complexity, or that yes, this movie is more about getting every
laugh it can than about making you believe that the adventures of Space
Argonauts matter in a broader societal sense.
I feel sorry for those people, for their lives must be dank, dark, and
miserable indeed. For Thor: Ragnarok is, put quite simply, fun
as all hell. It’s the most fun and
hardest laughs I’ve had at the theater this year, and in these dark times there
is a power and value in that that we underestimate at our own peril.

You
may disagree. You may want something
else from your comic book movie. And
that’s okay. I don’t, and now that Thor:
Ragnarok has given me what I always wanted, I never will.